1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to personal information management systems. More particularly, the present invention relates to interactive personal information management systems.
2. Background
People today have busy schedules. A businessperson may have an entire day or week carefully planned out with meetings, interviews, and the like. Even grade school children now have less free time, between school in the daytime and extracurricular activities (such as sports or music lessons) in the late afternoon and early evening.
To account for the more hectic modern lifestyle, several types of devices exist to help people manage their schedules. Cellular telephones allow immediate communication, useful to learn of any changes in plans. Personal digital assistants (PDAs) enable people to manage their schedules and to update the schedules as needed. Recently, the functions offered by these types of devices have begun to merge. Cellular phones now have calendar and contact applications. Similarly, PDAs now offer mobile telephony and Internet access.
Despite these advances, it remains difficult to keep up to date on important changes. For example, a professor may use electronic mail (E-mail) to send a syllabus listing assignment due dates to students at the beginning of the semester. Later in the semester, the syllabus may need to change to reflect circumstances unforeseen at the beginning of the semester (the professor may be going through the material more slowly or quickly than planned). As a result, the professor may decide to extend an assignment deadline.
Presently, the professor has several ways to communicate the extended assignment deadline to students. The professor could send an E-mail to all students notifying them of the change. However, there is no guarantee the students will receive the message. Nor can the professor be certain the students will read the message even if they have received the message. Finally, the professor has no way to ensure the students will enter the changed deadline into their own calendar (or other personal management) program. As a result, some students will not know of the changed deadline.
The professor could also make an announcement of the changed deadline in class. However, this solution has several of the same problems as the E-mail solution. Not all students may attend the class; these students would have to rely on others to receive news of the extended deadline. In addition, students may write the date down incorrectly; or, if they wrote the date down on paper, they may lose the paper they wrote the date on.
In short, despite advances in technology, people today still do not have an effective way of knowing whether their schedule, or other important information, has changed. What is needed is a way for one individual to automatically inform or update information in the schedules of others.